It’s a sight to behold, all the more impressive given that director Zack Snyder brought his music-driven slow-mo spectacle to life by transforming five actresses with zero action experience into persuasively menacing warriors.

The PG-13 picture, opening Friday, serves up violence-laced set pieces sprung from the imagination of a character called Babydoll (played by Emily Browning). Unjustly dispatched by a greedy uncle (James Gandolfini) to an insane asylum that for some reason doubles as a brothel, Babydoll leads fellow inmates Amber, Sweet Pea, Blondie and Rocket (Jamie Chung, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens and Jena Malone) through a series of fantastic voyages spanning World War I, World War II and outer-space environments conjured by Avatar production designer Rick Carter.

In Sucker Punch, Jena Malone plays Rocket.

Malone’s runaway character becomes the first to befriend the newcomer, after Babydoll saves her from being raped by a disgustingly corpulent cook. In a phone interview with Wired.com, Malone said she appreciated Snyder’s eagerness to upend superhero conventions.

“In most action movies, the men lead, and the women are either damsels in distress or complete sexpots who show no vulnerability whatsoever,” she said. “What’s so great about Zack is not just that he’s creating these genre-bending worlds we’ve never seen before, but in Sucker Punch, he’s taking female characters into this surrealistic-action genre and showing that they have multiple dimensions.”

Sucker Punch represents the most visually sensational blow against Hollywood’s guy-heavy action formula in some time. Call it the Kick-Ass effect: Rebounding from years of neglect following benchmark work by Sigourney Weaver and Angelina Jolie in the Alien and Lara Croft franchises, fierce females regained some respect in 2010, thanks to Chloe Moretz’s jaw-dropping turn as the lethally acrobatic Hit Girl in the Kick-Ass movie based on Mark Millar’s hyperviolent comic.

Exercising a more subtle strain of empowerment, Hailee Steinfeld and Jennifer Lawrence turned in Oscar-nominated performances as rural tough girls in True Grit and Winter’s Bone respectively, without having to throw a punch. And next month, Natalie Portman mocks medieval cliches as an ass-kicking princess in Your Highness, while teenager Saoirse Ronan, hitting a more serious note in Hanna, revives the female assassin motif introduced in 1990’s La Femme Nikita.

Sucker Punch Training

A former child star, Jena Malone declared “emancipation” from her parents at age 14, so she’s no softie. Still, the 25-year-old actress never made a movie that required so much physical toughness and overt sexuality.

She and her Sucker Punch castmates trained for eight months. “We’d do four hours every morning with stretch warm-ups, a little bit of mixed martial arts Wushu training. We’d take a 45-minute break, then do about three hours of weight training, take another break, then go into a firearms studio to fire off some guns and do tactical positioning. Then I’d go off and do a pole-dancing lesson and probably end the night with a wardrobe-fitting where I’d get into these corsets and garter belts.”

Back at Sucker Punch‘s nuthouse, the inmates’ chatty scenes sometimes play like outtakes from The CW’s teen soap Gossip Girl, but the action sequences are worth waiting for. Snyder and cinematographer Larry Fong (Watchmen, 300) excel at aerial vistas of smoke-smeared battlefields, dirigibles, tanks and other artifacts of mechanized warfare.

Amid all this mod-militaristic eye candy, Babydoll’s escapist fantasies — set to pop anthems by Jefferson Airplane, the Beatles and Eurythmics — wallop the senses.

Over the top? Sure. But Snyder knows how to command attention by staging weirdly hybridized forms of mayhem on a hyperheroic scale. Red-orbed German robosoldiers getting whacked in the trenches by a crew of machine-gun-wielding teenagers in hot pants does have a way of riveting an audience’s attention.

“They’re fighting their demons and fears and kind of wearing their hearts on their sleeves,” she said. “Through their own imagination and willpower, and their own strength, these women basically end up saving themselves.”

As for the skimpy costumes, Malone argues that the wardrobe makes sense within the context of the story.

“In a brothel, what is a woman’s choice?” she said. “What tools do these girls have to fight with? They’re given lace and garter belts, and that’s what they have to use to demand control, power.”

Malone said she welcomed the chance to go into attack mode in Sucker Punch, and recommends ass-kicking training for all females, whether they’re looking for a fight or not.

“The first three weeks of training for Sucker Punch were the worst, toughest weeks of my life,” she said, “but once I became accustomed to the regimen, my body started craving it, my mind started craving it, muscles started pouring onto my body — it was sort of incredible. I recommend martial arts for all women, because it’s such a beautiful way to release aggression. To feel your body’s strength through movement and get that release of endorphins when you yell, shout, punch and kick — that’s incredibly empowering.”